I'm glad to hear that he is willing to communicate with you. That the
treatment only results in the suppression of the virus, is a little
disappointing. This would make it about equivalent to the claims of Dr.
Belfield for his vitamin C therapy. He claims he "cured" every FeLV
positive cat that came through his practice, using his Mega C formula (takes
much longer than the time cited in the VanDyke study) but later says that if
you stop giving the Mega C, the virus will return. That would indicate to
me that the virus isn't cured, just suppressed. Not that there is anything
wrong with suppressing the virus and stopping it's progression. Dr.
Belfield says there are not side effects from long term use of his Mega C
formula, but I do have to wonder about side effects from the long term use
of Depo.
Thanks for getting the info.
Gary
--------------------------------------------------
From: "jbero tds.net" <jb...@tds.net>
Sent: Monday, April 19, 2010 10:18 AM
To: <felvtalk@felineleukemia.org>
Subject: [Felvtalk] Knox and treatment of felv
I just wanted to update you all where I'm at now. I got an email from Dr.
Van Dyke, the biochemist involved in this treatment plan.
To set a few things straight - he was doing research to find a cure for
HIV/AIDS and using cats as an animal model. The intermixed use of
FIV/HIV/Felv was in part because of the knowledge at the time concerning
the
believed similarities of HIV and FIV and in part simply to say that
hopefully HIV would behave similarily to FIV and that his work on cats
could
be carried over to people. Probably not entirely accurate.
With respect to the patent being abandoned, it was but he sent me the
number
of different patent - #6514955.
Finally - and I will ask him about this - the paper describes latently
infected cats (this by definition means integrated into the host DNA) -
but
I will clarify this with him.
Apparently, what this does is use antioxidants and steroids in combination
to suppress the production of virus. It does not 'cure' anyone in that
the
viral DNA is still within the cat cells, but they are not able to multiple
and thereby infect other cells. This, by the way, is the essence of HAART
therapy currently used to treat HIV (the difference is that the drugs used
now directly inhibit viral activity, in Van Dyke's approach,it is an
attempt
to get the body to do it for you).
The value of this is that if the virus cannot replicate, it cannot mutate
(the mutated form of felv is the one that is thought to cause the
hematologic diseases and it not contagious; i.e. the virus must mutate
within the cat in order to cause these problems). The downside is that
the
treatment is lifelong.
I will ask him for more information and keep you updated.
Hope this helps.
Jenny
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